To reply to Mark Yzaguirre:
My circle in Washington may be an outlier. But many of the people I know either served or had children serve in Iraq, sometimes in the military, sometimes in what could be even more dangerous civilian roles.
Which reminds me to bring to light again this noteworthy essay by Eliot Cohen, published in 2005 as his son went off to Iraq.
So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that's what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.
The Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass destruction. The true arguments for war reached deeper than that. Long before 2003, weapons inspections in Iraq had broken down, and sanctions, thanks to countries like Russia, China and France, were failing.
The regime's character and ambitions, including its desire to resume suspended weapons programs, had not changed. In the meanwhile, the policy of isolation had brought suffering to the Iraqi people and had not stabilized the Gulf. Read Osama bin Laden's fatwas in the late 1990s and see how the massive American presence in Saudi Arabia -- a presence born of the need to keep Saddam Hussein in his cage -- fed the outrage of the jihadis with whom we are in a war that will last a generation or more.
I traveled to Iraq with Eliot Cohen in 2006. Before we arrived, he worried whether he'd have an opportunity to see his son. When we arrived, we found that some good soul had assigned Eliot's son to us as our escort officer.
